News & Updates

Polyglot Systems, Inc. and CellepathicRx announced a partnership to provide medication adherence services to patients with limited English proficiency. CPRx will use its mobile health platform to bring Polyglot’s Meducation program to smart phone apps and e-mail. Meducation lets physicians and pharmacists communicate medical instructions and educational content in multiple languages.

The GSM Association predicted that the global mobile health market revenue opportunity will reach $23 billion by 2017. Europe is expected to lead that market with revenues of about $6.9 billion, while the North American market could reach $6.5 billion.

Maryland is expected to announced that all state hospitals are using its health information exchange, according to the Maryland Business Journal. This means that the state’s 46 hospitals are able transmit and receive data on admissions, discharges and transfers. However the Maryland information exchange is a fledgling system, and many hospitals can’t communicate much else besides basic data with each other.

A pre-HIMSS12 announcement came from Dell, which will partner with Siemens to share and archive medical images via a secure cloud. According to ESG Research, medical image data in North America is projected to grow more than 35 percent annually to reach nearly 2.6 terabytes by 2014. The alliance with Siemens will significantly extend Dell’s Unified Clinical Archive, which includes radiology, cardiology, neurosurgery, endoscopy, pathology and patient records data.

Telehealth provider Teladoc will launch its new program for physicians at HIMSS12. The service, called TeladocConnect, allows physicians to communicate with patients 24/7 via phone or secure online video. Practices, distribution partners and health plans can sign up for TeladocConnect, and physicians can be reimbursed for consults.

Electronic health records can lead to physician information overload, according to a recent study published in the archives of internal medicine. The study was conducted in the outpatient clinics of a large, tertiary-care Department of Veterans Affairs facility. The EHRs physicians used at the facility included an inbox for “additional signature request” — or notes that require an electronic signature. More than half of the alerts were classified as high value, or harmful if missed, but they required physicians to read through large amounts of extraneous text to find important information, according to an article in Medscape Today.

AT&T announced it will launch a beta version of the AT&T Developer Center For Health practice. The goal is to allow developers to use the open set of tools to help better integrate disparate health systems. Developers can sign up now to use the beta version of the Center and can attend codeathons, hackathons and developer boot camps held by several mobile health developer communities including HIMSS, Rock Health, StartUp Health and Health 2.0.

President Barak Obama’s proposed budget for 2013 calls for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to receive $66 million for the year — $5 million more than budgeted for ONC in 2012, according to Government Health IT. The increase would help to fund the nationwide health IT infrastructure and meaningful use incentive payments.

Ninety-one percent of small health care organizations of 250 or fewer employees experienced a data breach in the last year, according to a Ponemon Institute study sponsored by managed data provider MegaPath. The study concluded that the biggest threats to data security are negligent employees and organizations’ inability to meet compliance requirements.